Feud: A Bittersweet Beauty by Emily Nussbaum

Emily Nussbaum opens her wonderful New Yorker article with a timely question, “Why did white women vote for Trump? For one source of insight, try “Feud,” on FX, a barbed and bittersweet fable about female self-sabotage. The latest provocation from Ryan Murphy, “Feud” is a dramatization of the making of the 1962 camp-classic movie “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?,” which starred Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Beneath the zingers and the poolside muumuus, the show’s stark theme is how skillfully patriarchy screws with women’s heads—mostly by building a home in there.

A prolific auteur with an abiding interest in glamour and cruelty, Murphy is a thrillingly ambitious risk-taker, bending old genres into fresh forms; he’s also famously inconsistent, a Rumpelstiltskin who can spin seemingly offensive concepts into gold—as in last year’s outstanding “The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story”—or fly off the rails, sometimes in the same show. “Feud” is his most recent franchise, and, like “American Horror Story” and “American Crime Story,” it’s designed to tell one narrative a season.”